Posted
by
samzenpuson Thursday December 22, 2011 @11:08PM
from the check-it-out dept.

First time accepted submitter anwe79 writes "Those of you who have been wishing for a Raspberry Pi this Christmas will sadly not get your wish granted. However, you may be happy to hear that populated beta boards have now been produced. Beta of course means the boards still have some more testing to undergo. But, if all goes well, those inclined should be able to get their hands on production boards in January!"

Go away. If you've been following the website you'll see they're around 3 weeks behind schedule but have finished the whole design process and are now testing the hardware before mass production. Do you even know what vaporware is?

Of course I am still under the "it doesn't exist until I can blow it up my self doing something dumb" crowd but it's making good progress

It *is* making "good progress". But where these types of projects usually hang up is when they finally get to the stage where they need to put together the infrastructure to source parts, manufacture, and market the *product*. At this point, they generally realize that they just don't have the organization and resources necessary, and the sub-$100 price point is out-the-window unrealistic for the volume they can realistically project to move...

Dunno, I was in the same camp, no way they would actually ship at the stated prices, expect a doubling which would make it too expensive to be interesting. Or at least less interesting than the many other similar project computers and/or microcontroller products actually shipping. But if they are expecting to begin shipping next month and still holding to the original price they are either really going to pull it off or are truly idiots with zero business sense. I'd give em even odds at this point.:)

But why is it front page news every time these guys pass gas? If they ship it, that is news. Heck, when they auction off these guys I'd guess that would be news too. But d we need a story every month even when there isn't any actual news to report?

I don't think that's true. I try and follow the project as best I can, and I've not seen that claim made once. The first 100 (this batch) are going to be auctioned on ebay, but that was always the plan. They've got another 9,900 boards that are unpopulated, and if testing of the 100 goes well they'll be populated and sold for $25/$35 in Jan.

From what I gather - that was more because they had so much demand, they figured it was sensible to use market forces rather than have way more orders than they can handle. Jolly sensible, if you ask me - they get some capital from the initial sales, early buyers can still get it, people who would have bought it early, but don't care *that* much can wait a bit, get it at the advertised price. Better than having them all sold out for the first 4 months, making who gets it a random luck thing, and not gaining

Not true. The first 10k batch will be sold at the advertised price. $25 for the Model A and $35 for the Model B.

100 boards have been made for testing, 10 of those will be auctioned off if they work OK. Once all testing is done, the 10k batch will be ordered. That will be sometime in early January if all goes well.

The people behind the project have LOTS of experience in running big companies, so that's not an issue. And as for saying this is non-news. Hmm, I would have thought the first boards of what may be a game changing device coming off the production line would be news in most peoples book.

Perhaps you missed it, but Broadcom is selling them the silicon by tacking it on to larger production runs, so they've got as much as they want at quantity pricing.

I had missed that. I don't know much about the semiconductor industry so perhaps someone could confirm - does that mean that while they get them at quantity prices, that pricing is subject to Broadcom receiving sufficient orders for the same part so there are larger production runs to tack it onto?

It *is* making "good progress". But where these types of projects usually hang up is when they finally get to the stage where they need to put together the infrastructure to source parts, manufacture, and market the *product*. At this point, they generally realize that they just don't have the organization and resources necessary, and the sub-$100 price point is out-the-window unrealistic for the volume they can realistically project to move...

I think Raspberry Pi's price goal is pretty ambitious but at the same time it's not outrageous. It's basically running the same parts you'd find in any cheap ass media player. You can pick up media players for less than $100 and if you cut out the case, packaging, power supply, application software, optional software licences (e.g. AC3, Dolby), reseller margins, and just ship the barebones product you could do it for the price they're proposing. Or if not exactly then not far off it.

Sourcing the parts and getting it made really isn't a problem. I've done it for electronics with even more limited demand than this for a similar sized, similar part count board. There are assembly shops that can do runs of assembled boards right from just one example to hundreds of thousands, they do all the parts sourcing for you, you just give them a BOM and they organize it all. Most the parts on the Raspberry Pi will be common parts (resistors, capacitors, standard connectors, various ICs that get put

I think that surface-mount usb power connector will fail eventually since the images seem to show it not welded through-board.
Maybe they'll fix it on later models.(or it is already, but I'm not seeing the throughwelds from the pictures)

The surface mount USB on my Beaglebone fell right off. The glue holding it failed with hardly any stress. There are big lands to solder it to, but they didn't use these. They only used glue. What the heck is the attraction of these stupid mini and micro USB connectors anyway? Give me a soldered-through full-A connector any day.

From the earlier post of the bare boards (http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/402) the holes are there for the micro-usb, and the project has been geared towards clumsy hands plugging and unplugging the ports a lot so I'd expect a robust connection.

All your worries can be solved with the right enclosure. The USB connector will be as sturdy as you make it. For example, encase this entire board in resin... nothings coming off it. That's the simplest solution, and it might cause overheating, but if you sit down and think about it, there are a lot of other ways of making that connector more secure.

This board is perfect if you want to learn to program ARM assembly or cross-compiling but the ARM architecture it's one of the most closed and patent-restricted technologies out there. Teaching ARM is the equivalent to teaching Visual Basic Programming, common but very closed architecture.

So it's not really open, even if the PCB design is open.

A truly open system would be OpenRISC [openrisc.net], there are dev. boards out there like this [orsoc.se] one (I'm not affiliated to OpenRISC in any way). They are more expensive because are made with are FPGAs, but that's what you should learn in school.

You could use these boards to teach Linux (operations, programming, etc.), cross-compiling techniques, embedded programming and lots more. Sure OpenRISC might be pure openess but it does not hurt to learn and teach practical stuff that could be put to use making a living.

Stop with the $25. That is just marketing, I doubt they actually expect to move the first one of those because they are pointless. You need a keyboard and mouse and the Model A only has one USB port. Good luck finding a hub cheap enough that it doesn't make more sense to just spend the extra $10 for the Model B and get a network port as a bonus. As if network is optional these days.... unless you are going WiFi but price that out... along with a hub. Not to mention that running much of anything modern

God forbid you might like to use the board to teach C, C++, perl, python, pascal, BASIC,..... this thing is designed for kids in a classroom and for use at home on the TV.It is designed to be dirt cheap so breaking one isn't going to be a problem.

RMS, is that you? The world is never going to be your communist open source utopia where closed source and profiting off of software is illegal. People don't need the netlist for every IC they use. This board is more closed than most, but it's a compromise I'm willing to make as the price per performance is better by a mile than anything out there.

They appear to be bending the USB spec quite seriously. A USB device is allowed to draw up to 100mA before enumeration, and up to 500mA after being enumerated and negotiating for high power. They talk about using up to 700mA with networking connected -- it's not clear to me how it could enumerate without booting first -- so they seem to be giving the middle finger to the USB specs. I predict unhappiness when people find that only some USB power sources are going to tolerate the load.

Is it so hard to put a couple of holes in the board to solder wire to?

Well, I would imagine that this is so that you can use any old USB power supply that you have on hand. You know, the same ones used by all decent modern phones, the Nook, some cameras, etc. If you shop around, you can score a 120V to USB power supply for well under $5, and most everybody has a micro-USB cable lying around.

Some monitors even have USB hubs built-in. Easy enough to hook a cable from the monitor to the Raspberry PI for power, and another cable from the Raspberry Pi to the monitor for USB con

As someone who's built USB devices I can tell you it's a gamble anyway. I've seen busses give 500mA without negotiation and I've seen busses that won't put out 500mA after, and I've seen busses where the manufacturer realized people wanted to charge things so they put out something like 1500mA.

As for devices that plug in to USB but require more than 500mA to run check out the BeagleBoard - it requires more than 500mA to use most peripherals (network) but if you run on anything more than 500mA the thing star

I strongly expect Raz went for USB power to avoid all the national electrical approvals necessary for wallwarts. Remember, this is a shoe-string outfit. Just get a phone charger with someone else' approvals. They probably chose micro- over mini- because the former are more likely to make 700+ (iPod & smartphone draws).

The choice of microUSB rather than USB-B or something is probably because there is a spec for high power over microUSB. It's used in the new standard mobile phone chargers. IIRC, a dumb charger can short the D+ and D- pins; indicating that it is too stupid to operate a real bus or do enumeration, but a device is welcome to draw as much current as it wants (with voltage possibly dropping if it draws to much; like a battery).

Perhaps somebody more knowledgable could correct some details or link us to the spec

My Samsung plasma (a couple of years old now) already has a UPNP/DLNA network media player, youtube interface, app-installer type thing and a variety of other stuff built in. Meaning it's already got a general purpose embedded computer in there, it's just feature limited at the moment.

That's true. I think there'll still be a place for these as separate boards though; for the educational and hobbyist markets (which I think is what they're targeting and expecting to be popular with) it's quite important to be able to easily replace broken devices and to be able to incorporate them into other designs.

Seriously, I would install a dozen of these type B boards in a case, only use a single power supply, a Ethernet switch and make a low power blade server. I think the power / speed / price ratio would work out. Add a NAS for storage, and you could have a fairly powerful blade for a fraction of the big boys. BOM works out to 12 x 35 = 420. Add a case / PS, Switch. Boot from SD and store everything on a NAS (add extra cost for storage). There's a lot to like about these boards. I think they could be a game changer.

I think you've brought up a very good point: Are there *already* "mature" products that do these things? The Arduino product line comes to mind. There is MUCH to like about Raspberry Pi, but little chance we'll ever see these things marketed for a reasonable *hobby* price. Prototyping something and saying the parts cost xyz does not really address realistic cost of the infrastructure necessary to actually source, manufacture, and yes, *market* something like this, which in all reality is very niche.

And, Arduino already exists in this market. This is not a troll: What does Raspberry Pi expect to do that something in the Arduino line does not? What are Raspberry Pi's close "competitors" in terms of expected use similarity? And, is there room for more than one or two competing products in this niche?

This is a full blown Linux box, unlike Arduino. I'm planning on hooking up a small USB-SP/DIF board [minidsp.com]. With a USB wifi adapter and web interface controlled by my phone, I'll have a cheap, pocket sized, remote controlled "bit bucket" for my concert recording hobby. I doubt you can do that with Arduino, or at least not without major hacking.

It has onboard storage via the SD card slot; and USB for external storage (the only external storage anybody really uses now anyway). You just need a mouse, a keyboard, and a monitor, which plenty of PCs don't come with.

umm, I wouldn't call them "more eager", debian have supported arm since before ubuntu existed and are currently in the process of bringing up a new hardfloat arm port to complement their existing softfloat port.

Rapeberry PI does not appear to be positioned as an Arduino competitor, but rather as an accessible (monetarily) computer. Please explain how the Arduino is even remotely positioned as an accessible computing platform.

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2011/09/arduino-arm-products/

96 MHz, 256KB RAM... fast, but have fun trying to run any software a typical consumer would be willing and able to use...

Is it? As yet, it *is not* in production, so on both of those points, it's impossible to say. It would be nice, though. And of course AFTER you add in the cost of an io device like a keyboard and of course a storage device, what's the total price now? Without some way to interact and store code, it's no more than a chip on a board.

Seriously, tooting about a $25 *nix computer is a bit disingenuous unless one also mentions that without spending about $200 or so more, there isn't much you can do with it. And

yeah, i'm confused. i just saw that arduino retails at 15USD at the local hobby shop. it has a 16MHz atmega328 and 32KB flash memory. these raspberry guys are promising a board that is the same size and has 700MHz arm11, 128MB ram, and sd card slot at 25USD??!!?1seems bullshit to me. if it were possible to do it so cheap, somebody would have been selling these by now.

Bingo. But it's not so much that the Arduino overpriced; there's just no real pressure to make it cheaper than $15. Heck, that's close enough to free already.

GP should realize that you can always say "somebody would have done it already". The Wright Flyer, the Model T, the light bulb (heck, it's just a hot wire in a vacuum). Well, "somebody" *IS* doing it first.

The Raz' closest competitor are the plugs (Sheeva, Guru, Pogo-,...) and they are OK for ssh. Arduino is fine as a microcontroller, but is no GP computer.

What is unique and very interesting about the Raz is HDMI output. It can easily be a small xterm, or any other app you can compile for ARMv5t and stick on the SD card. Or email / web-browser on the network model. Not fast, but useable.

The Raz' closest competitor are the plugs (Sheeva, Guru, Pogo-,...) and they are OK for ssh

The sheevaplug I have is powerful enough to run Gnome 2 in a vnc session. It also has built in storage and an SD reader.

"What is unique and very interesting about the Raz is HDMI output"

That's not unique, the Guruplug Display has HDMI also, though I have no idea if that ever really took off and I have a feeling debian had decided not to support it. It is more poweful than the Pi, and has twice the RAM.

And, is there room for more than one or two competing products in this niche?

If, by niche, you mean sub $100 ready to go project boards with USB and HDMI? I don't know of any others just lying around at the moment. Beagle / Panda are getting close, but they are a) bigger, and b) more expensive.

In the sub $100 project board space, there always seems to be room for a bunch of players, kind of like "free games."

The Arduino is an advanced microcontroller. The RaspberryPi is a minimilist Linux computer. Not an embedded thingy like iPodLinux either; it's capable of running a real, conventional distro with glibc, Xorg, etc.

Arduinos are for retards. They're for all the people who seek validation being able to get LEDs to blink without knowing any annoying facts like operating voltages. The Raspberry Pi, however, is a BASIC stamp. That means that the real money-makers, the ones who know microcode, get back to work.

OK, WTF, time out. Can someone please explain this strange new trend of trolling with the intent of making yourself look stupid? I think it started on either 4chan or Fark, but it's been showing up here a lot lately. When I learned to troll, I was taught that the idea was to make the other guy look stupid.

Kids these days. Personally, I blame the excessive use of psychoactive prescription drugs in our schools.

It costs extra to replace the Broadcom crap with something documented. Check out the Beaglebone. It's $89, but everything is documented. The Beaglebone is intended for screwing with hardware. It includes IO pins.

The $89 BeagleBone is for screwing with hardware. There are pins bringing out logic IO. Everything is open and documented. They don't have any video because that's not what it's for. The Raspberry Pi is for screwing with software. They don't bother bringing out logic IO pins because that's not what it's for. There are proprietary binary blobs for the cheapass Broadcom shit. To some extent the products overlap, but the targets are different.

I want a bunch of them, I've got several ideas already.
Personally I want one to make into a software defined radio transceiver (hopefully there will be an API to the DSP to do the heavy lifting on this,) I want one to use as a browser in the kitchen for looking at recipes while cooking, and I want one to have on my desk at work as a syslog display machine. To do the first without using a Pi, I'd need to do an awful lot of embedded development myself whereas here a lot of the work has been done already.